Observations from the Living Anatomy

I'm an aspiring neuroscience major with emphases in psychology and biology at Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN). As the body speaks of nothing but the truth, I find that understanding the unspoken secrets of the brain will be the most exciting collection of knowledge to ever await itself for human discovery...

[the-quiet-elephant]

A “Tail” Of Two Rats

Q: How does one carry out animal research ethically and responsibly?

Pictured: Two former lab rats born on Christmas Day in 2014.Delilah is on the left, Buffy adjacent right.

Throughout the fall semester, I’ve been carrying out preliminary drug trials in a rat model of learning and anxiety. As I had started to figure out for myself, the benefits to any type of animal research must outweigh the limitations by an immeasurably large margin. Here at Macalester College in Minnesota, we were required to fill out an International Animal Care and Use Committee proposal (IACUC, for short), providing justification for the research hypothesis, protocol, and accompanying citations from previous studies indicating the safety and necessity of all the techniques and dosages that the lab animals are involved in. The form is peer-reviewed by several different parties of the IACUC, and the experiment is only approved pending a substantiated humane use of animal lives.

Animal models often provide lots of invaluable information that may better the world in areas of science that depend on observing the whole organism at work. As we chart our progress using scientific discoveries obtained from animal research, we may eventually not have to rely solely on animal models to obtain conclusive results. Cutting-edge research on regenerative cellular growth, biomedical engineering, and accurate computer programs developed from big data sources are providing a great starting point for developing viable alternatives to alternative research models. However, scientists are a growing body of humble and ethically minded critical thinkers. The scientific community knows that the best insights they can glean from experiments with highly beneficial results often rely on the use of model organisms. After factoring in the diversity in the types of experiments conducted, as well as the research questions we need answers to, we are currently unable to replicate the unpredictable complexity of life by using any other means of learning. Simply put, there is much we still don’t know about the inner mechanisms regarding life and its manifested behaviors. 

Pictured: Buffy’s first free-roam romp around the bed.

The results from my study did not yield significant results. Although I had spent a good chunk of my semester investing my efforts into this research project, I realize that this is the first such experimental design I had set up independently and I did not have the experience or the wherewithal to account for all the unexpected setbacks. I was lying prostrate at the mercy of time and resources, but lacked both. It is common observation that many controlled animal experiments do not yield significant results. This is not merely to be seen as a waste in resources or the expenditure of animals; rather, researchers often provide interesting theories as to why their experiments did not work and suggest proposals for people who wish to pursue follow-up studies in the subject. This ensures that the experimenters take responsibility for their actions. At Macalester College, students participating in animal research programs often work closely with their species, and are given the option to adopt several of their animals at the end of the study. Since I gave my rats high-stress conditions for naught, I decided to take home two very friendly -yet extremely anxious- girls.

It’s been about 4 weeks since I’ve had Buffy and Delilah. I’ve been able to provide them with an enriched housing environment and a few hours of free roaming time each day. Their favorite treats include dried fruits, applesauce, and yogurt. Now they are litter-trained, able to respond to their names and have learned a few other neat climbing tricks. Because they have short life spans, I’m only expecting them to live another year or so at best. However, it’s nice to know that their career as lab rats are officially over.

Pictured below: The celebratory moment when a newly retired rat instantly learns how to perch on your shoulders.

[the-quiet-elephant]

Two just-blooming trees on campus in MN. Their points of intersection and rounded, nodule-like tips resemble pyramidal cells in the brain. 

[the-quiet-elephant]

“Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.” -Charles Spurgeon

Q: Have you ever struggled with mental illness?

Hello tumblrs,

It’s a bright and amazing May day outside, but it is also finals season and the beginning of Mental Health Month. Honestly, I think that every month should be a Mental Health Month. When are people with psychiatric disorders not going to be affected by impaired cognitive function? Is it because the collegiate crowd is undergoing their penultimate finals? However, naming and coincidence aside, I do think it’s important to understand what’s going on for people who have these disorders.

Compared with other “visible” illnesses, psychiatric disorders are often difficult to spot based on an individual’s physiology alone. It is only upon interacting closely with someone where you are able to tell if some of the behaviors that person is displaying may be just a tad bit “off”. I call these disorders the silent killers (about 9 in 10 people who have committed suicide have also suffered from a mental disorder). The lifetime prevalence of anxiety disorders, which are the most common type of mental illness, stands at around 28%. This is a relatively modest estimate, and means that by the time you’re well into adulthood, there’s a great chance that 1 out of 4 people is struggling or has struggled with manifested anxiety. Although I wouldn’t say that it is the most debilitating mental disorder, it certainly is the most prevalent.

Anxiety, or the “fear of the unknown”, is associated with the worry, fear, and rumination of events that have happened, or are likely to happen. This is a valid physiological response to stress, and hormonal signals of anxiety will readily circulate through the nervous system’s high-arousal sympathetic response circuitry. Normally, such responses are needed to mitigate high-stakes situations from an evolutionary standpoint. 

Without being motivated by the feeling of anxiety, the human species would likely not have survived through ordeals for as long as we did. 

An anxiety disorder is the change in the normal processing of the body’s natural stress response mechanisms, wherein physiological arousal becomes constant and excessive. This will impair normal functioning of individuals by creating inappropriate, indiscriminate stress responses. These behavioral impairments are reflected in how the circuitry of the brain processes anxious stimuli. Individuals will display increasingly higher levels of activation in the amygdala (a fear-processing structure) in relation to the severity of their anxiety and decreased activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; an area known to suppress situationally inappropriate emotional responses). 

Other areas that people the anxiety disorders have different levels of activity in are the hypothalamus (HYP; relays appropriate physiological response as stress hormones), anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG; decreased activity results in impaired emotional processing), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC; involved in decision making), and the insular cortex (activates in response to unpleasant stimuli). 

“If you don't think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system. Learn how to cope, sweet friend.” -Kris Carr

Often, the combination of high stress and genetics manifest in such disorders that hijack normal physiological functions and pits us against our own bodies. Neuroscience strives to understand more about the physiological causes of anxiety to so it can become possible to effectively treat what was once called the “invisible” mental illness. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to eradicate unnecessary anxiety by physiologically medicating and psychologically nourishing individuals who are struggling against their own bodies. 

For more information on the age-onset of mental illnesses, please see the link below:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/09/03/cdc-statistics-mental-illness-in-the-us/

[the-quiet-elephant]

“It would be very unsafe, unwise, and incorrect to assume that a patient either can or wants to present all aspects of his or her personality fully to the examiner.” -Walter George Klopfer 

Q: What if, while working in your hospital’s neurology department, a patient with what appears to be no physiological impairments walks into the emergency room, demanding to understand what’s wrong with him/her?

This happens quite often in hospitals. Patients may reach the emergency room of their own accord to seek treatment for an undiagnosed illness, yet they often are unwilling or unable to share all the information necessary for doctors to create an accurate diagnosis. Upon signing into the emergency room, the professionals before you will compile a mostly uninformative patient case file in which doctors will have to base their diagnostic exam on. In many cases, patients will not even disclose to you their complete stories. 

We had to replicate the patient-physician dynamic in our neuroscience lab. By rotating in as patients with an unknown neurological disorder or doctors in the neurology department, we play-acted several scenarios. Of course, we were given a pass-fail ultimatum should we not assign the correct diagnosis for our patients. Thankfully, my group was able to work quickly and efficiently with each other (yay, passing grades!) and we were able to come to the correct conclusions, with a tentative treatment plan for our patients as well. 

This exercise made me really question the accuracy of medical diagnoses- our patients could be duplicitous and our case files were sometimes misleading (or even mixed up), yet as “future neurologists” we were still expected to pull through with the intention of quickly and accurately dealing with our patients. The world of health care is, I found, always a gamble, a game of telephone, and sometimes even a crapshoot. I am so grateful for the doctors out there who are able to deal with such high stakes and rely on their knowledge and intuition to help us when we are in a condition where we are unable to help ourselves.

[the-quiet-elephant]

Anthropogenic Validation

Above is a picture of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh embracing Kanzi, one of the many primates that this amazing human being has had the chance to equip with a human medium for language. Kanzi and the others in the Great Apes Trust program were trained to form arbitrary associations with human speech, visual icons, behaviors, and emotive gestures to form meaningful communication. The bonobos, our closest genetically related relatives, are able to utilize over 300 learned associations to interact with humans. This enables them with the ability to process even the abstracted concepts language and use basic grammatical structures to clearly and logically express their thoughts in a way that we can understand them.

While I think that these studies showcase the amazing level of sophistication and plasticity in the mammalian brain structures, science is set on proving to us that we are different, set apart, and wholly unique human species that dominantes the current state of the world for evilutionary reasons. John Hughlings Jackson, a 19th century neurologist, conjectured that the human brain consists of particularly useful additive properties. It was known then that continuous lesioning of the structures of the brain moving from the neocortex to the subcortical areas of the brain produced increasing deficits. Upon lesioning the brain stem, the individual would cease to live. Therefore, the human brain's relative proliferation of additional latter day gray matter and specialized connections would have evolved to create room for a higher efficiency of preexisting language skills.

Although the great apes are able to reflect on the past, plan for the future and communicate in the present, humans are equipped with more efficient machinery to do all of the following with a much greater magnitude of effect. We are able to reminisce decades down the line, have created hundreds of shared elaborate languages, and can voice our guesses about events many years into the future. So yes, as of where current research stands, we are still able to validate ourselves as a cognitively superior species so many of us can justify our existence and proliferation.

[the-quiet-elephant]

I spent the year waiting for the first day of spring. I heard that the flowers will whisper to me, sighing at the absurdity of winter and tickling my ears with delight from the rustling petals that tell me, "Hark! The snow is gone."

[the-quiet-elephant]

While I was working hard at the coffee scene during my teen years, I had always thought that a shot of decaf was more than enough to liven me up for a whole shift, and then some. Having a coffee resembled something more along the lines of engaging in a two-sip taste test for the day rather than treating myself to a free energy boost. However, I would be catering to customers and regulars (who, in Hawaii, are more like extended family who love their medium roast Kona than anything else) with incredibly extravagant orders that indulged that delectable combination of sweet, fatty, and bitter made just right. They would line up three times a day along the outside of our shopping center in front of the daily hula show and were often waiting for most of their lunch break to get their fix, relax and power through another three hours before returning for another drink. 

Our class textbook claims that caffeine is not a mentionable topic for our section on Drug Abuse on the grounds that it is not nearly as potent or as physiologically addictive as the "hard drugs". However, I've noticed that these regular customers engage in compulsive behaviors that could qualify as addiction. They will:

1. refuse to deviate from purchasing their drink order 2. often build highly personalized and extremely complex drink orders that fully meet their expectations on drink taste and caffeine content 3. order multiple times throughout the day, at the same time of day, and will feel anxious without having their regimental fix 4. spend an exorbitant amount of money, expending time and resources on their daily orders (ex: 1 Starbucks 12oz hot coffee is $2.95; ordering 5 per week for a year would cost $767!) 5. continue to drink coffee beverages even after the event of a heart attack, high blood pressure, weight gain, anxiety attacks, etc 6. experience severe caffeine withdrawal in the form of migraines, light sensitivity, dizziness, drowsiness 7. express high comorbidity between regular coffee drinking and frequent use of other drugs

I think that the above behaviors actually constitute ample signs for addictive tendencies. However, the cultural idea on coffee is that of a tasty gourmet stimulant that is enjoyable, socially engaging, and increases societal productivity. Coffee politics have hitherto remained silent on the issue for much of the 20th century, and only made the ice breaking move this year. www.health.gov released a study by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion this year stating the minimal health risks of regular coffee consumption. This is because coffee is ubiquitous and can potentially benefit performance (and GDP). 

The controversial nature of the studies is due in part from the individual physiologies of the target population- the whole nation. I have dabbled with caffeine, but I found that situationally reaching for drinks or pills during sleep deprived high-stress moments would mean that I would forget ever taking the drug in the first place. I would then experience the physiological and psychoactive arousal without justifying its cause, which would involuntarily lose focus, turn jittery, and feel myself physically undergoing anxiety attacks without the emotional triggers. (But then again, my experience is 100 percent anecdotal, and not at all indicative of caffeine effects for most of the population. I'm often unable to drink more than a few sips of any beverage, unless it's water, due to sensitivities.) 

Similarly, the same cited benefits that link caffeine consumption to increased heart health can lead to adverse effects to a different population in a study, and vice versa. 

The take-home message is to consider the effects of caffeine as a drug, and to examine your place and investment in the issue to find out where you stand in this issue. For more info, here are some useful links that can help to answer some deeper questions:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-berardi-phd/coffee-health-benefits_b_3881377.html

http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/10-chapter-5/d5-5.asp

[the-quiet-elephant]

New blurb: check out www.gregadunn.com for some awesome gold-leaf etchings of beautiful scientifically crafted art. Greg Dunn utilizes precise lab technique and visualization to bring to life concepts that don’t seem quite as esoteric as you’d imagine, what with the Eastern, nature-imbued neurons that seem analogous to the branching patterns of trees. The first image shows Dunn’s Hippocampus II, a remarkably accurate representation of the neural tissue in a vertical cut. You can see how the hippocampus derived its namesake with similarities in its odd 3D shape to that of a seahorse. Additionally, I think that the cut and color schematic of Hipp II seems to be reminiscent of curling seashells, which makes this a beautifully arranged and conserved structure in nature. 

The hippocampus is special in its function as a dynamic region of the brain that is devoted to tracking changes how we respond to the environment around us- it is our very own dedicated learning device. The gnarly thing is that it constantly pieces memories and insights together in a nonlinear temporal dimension, where memories can take around 5 years or more to become fully consolidated (talk about space-time)! Because the hippocampus is remarkably responsive to change, it is also one of the first areas of the brain to experience cell death from carbon monoxide poisoning or suffocation from the lack of oxygen in the environment. Damage to the hippocampus affects the ability to remember events to be coded after the onset of damage, which results in anterograde amnesia. 

This in itself is highly remarkable, but I think that the formation for the physiological bases of memory consolidation in the hippocampus is even cooler. Sensory information enters the entorhinal cortex and ascends through the perforant path, synapsing with granule cells in the dentate gyrus. Then, action potentials carry the excitatory signals from CA3 to CA1, and back to the entorhinal cortex. This is a type of reverberating signal, where high activation of neural firing over time will induce a population of neurons in the hippocampus to repeat the firing signal pattern of a learned event over time. The hippocampus is able to sustain a living pattern of signals that we create in response to the feedback we receive from the environment. This hippocampal activity is responsible for inducing changes in the cerebral cortex over time in a spliced, nonlinear fashion. The hippocampus is responsible for so many of the long-term memories that we are able to consolidate! The cerebral cortex alone can only create small changes in the structure of the brain that consolidates learning in such a way that is limited to only producing implicit, sequence based muscle memories and the like. In many respects, the hippocampal formation and the limbic system is responsible for remembrance of events that shape our memories and personalities. We need these to form personal identities, and we are able to integrate these learned experiences as a continuous and seamless internal narrative. 

[the-quiet-elephant]

There are times when studies of the physiology of behavior will actually intersect with the day-to-day drudgery of my life. My most recent, but not yet relinquished, bane of my existence has been the Fox TV show, Lie To Me. The show is based on Dr. Paul Ekman’s foundational research on the universality of facial expressions, when reporting that locals in the last Stone Age era of the world in Papua New Guinea were able identify and create the very same facial expressions of emotions that the rest of us are capable of making. The field has exploded since then to engulf a small subset of pop culture, most prominently manifesting in this show. It embraces the Theory of Mind in that we have been evolutionarily driven to survive in a social context. Thus, the inferences and communicative gestures we have today have long been encoded as a part of many heritable traits in our genomes. 

In fact, the communicative behaviors can be seen in many organisms, such as the infant monkey shown above. Its motor areas are activating as an appropriate response to the situation, in which it is able to see the woman’s face, imitate her facial expression, and infer her emotional state via replicating it in itself. In addition, possible negative emotions are also mediated by autonomic and endocrine responses, the feedback of which we interpret in areas such as the amygdala, anterior insular cortex, and prefrontal cortex to form the appropriate set of emotional responses. 

I ended up embracing Lie To Me when I realized the magnitude of their first assumption of the human condition: the loophole formed by this all-powerful Theory of Mind enables us to inhibit and alter our interpretation of this honest physiological feedback so we can lie to each other. Certainly, I found this to initially appear as a rather disheartening truth. However, upon seeing the very honest and analytical characters of the show engage in duplicity themselves so as to fit themselves neatly into social contexts, I began to see how intricate the level of semantic manipulation could be for people who intentionally lie to avoid aversive situation -in fact, it often overwhelms individuals by forming a gap between one’s internal thoughts and outward behaviors. This cognitive dissonance, so to say, is something that the characters analyze in simultaneity. I think that with respect to the complexity of our emotional states, the constancy of these physiological and verbally communicated responses should be called into question more often.

Alas, if this proved to be much too negative for you, take heart in the fact that the obicularis oculi is contracted at the lateral corners of the eyes when a person genuinely smiles, a trait that Ekman had observed in his studies. The resulting “crow’s feet” is one marker to look for when an individual experiences a genuine feeling of happiness, even just a small bit from trying this particular smile on a whim. Furthermore, the smiling face is the expression that can be identified from the greatest distance, from as far as 70-80 meters, or as much as 84.5 yards away! 

***P.S. The image above actually depicts a digitally altered “Duchenne’s smile”, as the woman’s eyes themselves are not arranged in that irregular ovular formation which constitutes a genuine smile. Remember that using Photoshop to make one’s eyes appear bigger and clearer does not necessarily make a person look happier! 

[the-quiet-elephant]

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -Benjamin Franklin

Today we spent 90 minutes of training on a crash course to International-style tango. I am normally hyperaware of my lack of physical athleticism that leads me to be picked last on most team sports (hence my taking up individually paced activities such as hiking, running and tennis), so I was incredibly nervous about immersing myself in a vulnerable situation in front of a whole class, where mess-ups were guaranteed to occur. However, sweaty hands, social anxiety and crippling gracelessness were no match for my desire to not fall behind in class, so I went to the Cinema Ballroom a block away from school.

Lo and behold, we were first split up into leads and followers and taught a two-step walking sequence (not bad, this seems pretty typical for any dance class, I thought). Then we commenced with a rapid pairing of sequential movements and dance partners, learning the curving walk, link position, and a promenade. After thoroughly learning this, the sequence was broken with the interjection of a twist, the insertions of gender roles, head movements, foot placements, and further modifications of posturing. All the while, our dance instructor would repeat his instructions and replicate our movements for us to see and refine. I think that by the end of the hour we could “dance” for several bars’ worth of tango, which is far better than what I’d expected.

The learning, while being sequentially disorganized on purpose, was surprisingly effective, as we learn to build our knowledge of sequential and additive movements throughout the hour. This is because the waking brain constantly takes in sensory information from the lobes of the brain under the context of time and space to provide meaning and encoding of impulses for new events- conclusively meaning, the brain is constantly learning. This information is sent via the dorsal and ventral streams (pathways organizing the external stimuli into categories of ‘what’ and ‘where’ the information represented could possibly be) to areas of the brain that specialize in reaction of movements. 

The brain organizes movements into categories as well, placing functions that purposefully integrate intentional movements that are meaningful and separating those from arbitrary movements over time. Initial exposure to stimuli results in a respective set of neural impulses to the brain. When we are able to associate meaning between the time and favorability of a movement, the premotor cortex is activated to reinforce the neural impulses, turning the arbitrary link into a meaningful one. In a sequence of two or more movements, the supplementary motor cortex is shown to increase in activation for the planning of successive movements. When watching the dance instructor repeat a sequence, I was also activating sets of mirror neurons, or bodies of neural impulses that mimic my previously meaningful series of actions. This is combined with the physical execution of movement on my part, which is sent from the primary motor cortex to the body to form the new behavior (going against my natural urges to stifle dancing). Now, the improvement of the quality of my movements happened by integrating all of these parts of the brain, which created a process of refining my originally sluggish movements to become more technically accurate and yes, even enjoyable to execute. 

While I may make a less than stellar dancer in the future, I am using the same motor processes to become a better walker, talker, typist, and even a decent flutist. I may never have had the inclination to dance, as I thought I wouldn’t have the dexterity to do so. But I’m able to type and write and improve my performance on my instrument, so my argument against dancing was clearly facing some fault. I used the same dorsal and ventral pathways to do everything else that I engage in regularly or for the first time. This implies that learning is constant, adaptable to improvements, and should be frequently built upon and repeated through proper exposure to obtain the best quality of execution. By constantly developing this motor circuit with this knowledge of movement-based learning, I should be able to make better use of my brain and be able to learn to a higher degree of expertise in a shorter amount of time. We’ll see, maybe after my next brush with social dancing. ;)

[rishbishxx]

[the-quiet-elephant]

Q: If you were to undergo a dramatic temporary change in the way you perceive sensory information, would you do it?

The answer to that effect was yes, why not? We had already tasted and rated our baselines for pinches of table salt, MSG, sugar, M&Ms, and either Sweet Tarts or Laffy Taffy candy; half the experiment was already completed. No adverse side effects, just an unknown substance that I had to ingest during this week's neuro lab on gustation. I'm normally a dip-my-toes-in-the-ocean kind of person, but in the presence of an entire class filled with willing participants, I thought, "why not?"

So we swished around gymnema sylvestre, an Indian Ayurvedic herbal tea (other supplementary information withheld) for about 30 seconds, and repeated once. We then retasted everything to see what the difference was... and if you're not familiar with Aryuvedic remedies for diabetes, you were in for a shock.

Upon placing the expectedly delicious pinch of table sugar on the center of my tongue, I was instead greeted by a gritty, utterly tasteless and rapidly dissolving substance! Way to incite the wrath of 20 hungry students during a taste lab! 

Our professor quickly explained that gymnema sylvestre blocks the sweet receptors in the mouth, thereby forming a complete elimination of perceived sweetness for upwards of an hour. The tea is frequently prescribed to treat several forms of diabetes, in which the compounds actively regulate the production of insulin. However, we were able to taste all other substances, so long as they weren't sweet. This includes MSG, which uses taste receptors T1R1 and T1R3. Sweet receptors consist of T1R2 and T1R3, and because we were able to taste the full profile of MSG after ingestion of the tea, we concluded that one known function of gymnema sylvestre is that of an antagonist for T1R2 selectively. Pretty cool!

If you want to try out this experiment in either a lab setting or amongst your friends, here's the NCBI link to the formal write-up (try to use sugar instead of aspartame; unlike MSG, aspartame is actually bad for your health):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3592606/

Happy Science!

[the-quiet-elephant]

From novelty to proficiency, we have completed the multi-week sheep brain dissection! It actually took a long time for me to understand how structure and function could relate so well in the mammalian brain because everything was designed with purpose. I took home two key things yesterday (and no, not the brain, that started to smell increasingly bad with each passing week). The first is that no two brains are alike, and even the most sophisticated machines today would find difficulty in pinpointing the qualitative idiosyncrasies that constitute the individual brain, and except for when you're being TESTED on those individual differences like how I was yesterday, it's a beautiful and comforting thought. Without the aid of machines or extensive technique, we had to visualize the different planes of the "ideal" brain and it's structural placement and identify forty such structures with discrete sections of different brains. Sheep brains differ in color, varicosity, size and occasionally in the placement of what are supposed to be easily discernible structures! The second idea is that we can build our knowledge of the very rudimentary from here on to be able to possess the dexterity needed to understand all the big, hitherto unanswered thoughts that science can answer. I find neuro fascinating because it's essentially a philosophical study that has scientific closure. You ask, we answer. The science behind it is creative, which ends up setting a balance between pure theory and pure practice. 

"No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious." -- Deepak Chopra

[the-quiet-elephant]

What Is Dopamine for, Anyway? Love, Lust, Pleasure, Addiction?

"In a brain that people love to describe as “awash with chemicals,” one chemical always seems to stand out. Dopamine: the molecule behind all our most sinful behaviors and secret cravings. Dopamine is love. Dopamine is lust. Dopamine is adultery. Dopamine is motivation. Dopamine is attention. Dopamine is feminism. Dopamine..."

We spent a week digging through the very beginnings of neurotransmitter functions in the psychopharmacology chapter, where even the basic definitions and applications of these neurotransmitters could affect whole behavioral routines on such a large scale. I couldn't help but think that the chief neurotransmitter of interest, dopamine, was definitely a misnomer that developed from pop culture's insistence on labeling it as a cure-all, pleasure based chemical. So here's the clarification on that: many different neuromodulators that govern pleasure centered behavior are being synthesized in our bodies. Movement, attention, learning, and motivation are all necessary aspects of cognition that dopamine plays a huge part in. Check out the link to see what the hype on dopamine is all about!

[the-quiet-elephant]

On last week's studying prior to the neuroanatomy quiz.

[the-quiet-elephant]

Dissection can very well be a necessary good. Despite my love for animals, I was never able to truly appreciate the value of a life until I held a slightly underweight sheep's brain in but one hand today. Pulling up a Google image of this cute sheep just prior to the lab helped to put this existential quandary in perspective. Lives are precious, yet they are taken for the consideration of furthering not just humankind, but for the future well being of their species and many others. I can find no other causes to take lives, and I'm thankful that I'm able to study the physiology of one animal, one time, for this purpose.

[the-quiet-elephant]

Here's a video of one of my favorite families in existence- the glial cells. These cells function as the blue collar infrastructure that supports the society of the central nervous system. Much in the same way that blue collar workers are sturdy, plentiful and responsibly carrying out important tasks that keep a larger system working, glial cells are the vital constituents of neurons. Providing about half of the biomass of the brain, glial cells are directly responsible for the sustenance, support, insulation, repair and immune response of neurons. Some glial cells (astrocytes) can even retract and extend their "limbs" to swim around like amoebas, swinging by to latch onto neuronal appendages or to clean up cellular waste. If Tarzan of the cell world could be eco-friendly, this would be it.